The Future
by Mr. Bluu
Summary: Strickland stares at the now still water, waiting for that gory dance partner he knows is gone.


The lights overhead let out a dying whirr and cut out. As morning rises over Baltimore, OCCAM goes dark. Concrete halls melt into midnight, and sea-tiled bathrooms are enveloped with black blankets. Silence follows the darkness and as chamber after chamber becomes unlit, the dull hum becomes more encompassing. There is only the hissing of the orange-tinged boilers, and the soft splashing of the water in the paved pen that had held a god.

Strickland stands there, awash in the consuming, hungry dark. His dead eyes glare like a corpse into the nothing, his feet at the first, damp concrete step of the Asset's unenclosed tank. The dark saturates him, as the men who work here treat the water to support the creature. He stands at the foot of the tub, suit and all, and he wonders.

His eyes search the gently bobbing liquid. They dart from tiny wave to tiny wave, almost as if the Asset still waits beneath them, roiling hate and a thousand years of uncivilization in its heart. Strickland hates that part of himself, the one that relishes beholding the grunting, convulsing thing. He abhorred it as much as it did him, yet still it haunted him. When he dreamed of his time in Korea, of the hidden Northern soldiers in the brush, the murder in their eyes, those men aren't there. Instead it is the Asset, fins and gills all shuddering hideously, rising from the mud and setting upon him. His rifle jams, and the monster's claws rend his flesh as his screams rise through the wilderness.

Even with all of the spite he bears it, hot enough to roast a million worlds, it stays with him. And as much as he hates that part of him, he loves it too. Because it means he also dreams of its prostrate, suffering form, chained to a stone plinth with lights searing it from above. Strickland dreams of striking it with his prod, electricity coursing through it until it steams and its shell bursts like a cooked lobster. He'd known that would be his last fate when he'd bought that Cadillac. Like some mercurial prophet the salesman had set him on that path.

"The future," he'd said. "You're the man of the future."

And that insidious dreg of elder times was the past.

It did not belong here. The past was the Depression, the Philippines, Okinawa and Korea and every choking hellscape since.

The past was stagnation, was submission and assimilation. It was the ilk of Strickland who ruled the earth. They had built the bomb, they had colonized the world, they had taken the continent from the redskins. And, if God was good, Strickland would get to assist in wiping from the earth an entirely different kind of Red. His people had done these things. Not the blacks, not the gooks, certainly not the Soviets and not the howling savage in the tank. _Strickland's people._

But in the future, Strickland sees green candies and women as silent as the facility he stands in.

His revenant's pupils fly across the floor. Those two, the cleaners he'd interrogated after the disappearance of the Asset . . . They were good. The concrete is spotless, shimmering with detergents and soaps. Strickland remembers his finely polished shoes gliding around it as he walked into the room, black dolphins against the stone. That orderly, iridescent, angelic stone.

Strickland hates it. No more blood from the squirming hulk could stain it, and its roars no longer panged from each and every wall, vibrating through meter upon meter of vision of the awful, forgotten eons could no longer suffer here, and that notion is bile in Strickland's throat. Even his own blood, spilled so copiously in this very chamber, was undisturbed. He is a blue blood now that the Asset is gone, his fluids to remain within him until he is a husk and they dry up.

Strickland does not live without this creature to torment, to combat, to compete against. To destroy and dissolve.

One look at his fingers and he knows he is already dead. The infection of the necrotic flesh could be cured, but it was secondary, a numb pain compared to the deathly elixir of defeat. He had lost to the Asset. He had lost his life the moment this primitive, scaled ape had triumphed over him. Strickland, whose people had done so much. Those fingers are a stain on his suit, one he can never wash out, illuminating his unworthiness to all the world.

Strickland stares at the now still water, waiting for that gory dance partner he knows is gone. His eyes twist, and he feels like a beast. He wants to kick, to slam and slam and slam his prod into something green and scaly. He feels like he did in his office, with the cleaners, like a caged tiger, trapped in his suit and his rank and his chair. Strickland thinks back, back to stalking a different prey through a different wilderness, where naked and bloody he pulled a god from its throne. Where he is _free_ , free from Baltimore and Hoyt and OCCAM and it all. Free from Elaine and his children. Free from the eternal unlife that gripped him so tightly. Just he and the creature, battling till the end of time. Like the Rapture. Like Ragnarok.

How he _longed_ for the Asset again.

Strickland storms out of the room. Tonight, Fleming would pull up into his driveway, and the two would hunt down the Russian turncoat that had broken that great contender from Strickland's grasp. If he couldn't struggle against the creature for dominance, Hoffstetler would have to do.

He stalks like a wolf to his Cadillac.

Strickland drives home, and he thinks about the future.


End file.
